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Amnesty International said an analysis of an official Feb. 21 video released by the Egyptian military, trumpeting the triumphs of its northern Sinai crackdown on militants, showed one of the weapons, which can kill and maim indiscriminately. Although the video described the weapons as improvised explosive devices planted by the militants, Amnesty said, the markings on one identified it as an American-made Mk-118 anti-tank anti-personnel submunition, "which could only have been dropped by the Egyptian Air Force." Amnesty said the video showed the weapon to be "untampered with and in good condition despite its age," with an identifying number clearly...

Dangerous in a world that is so interconnected-where evil spreads in the blink of an eye, the click of a mouse. “While Christianity fought against its inner evil, removing it from its soul, Islam has not.” President Barak Obama spoke of intolerance at the National Prayer Breakfast February 5. He fears a backlash toward the more than 1.5 billion Muslims in the world after the release of the video of the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasaesbeh by ISIS. And the beheadings of journalists and other Westerners. And the news of Boko Haram and the Yazidis; the mass murder...

FROM BURNING BODIES TO BURNING BOOKS: EGYPT IS BECOMING A "HOUSE OF DUST" By Raymond Stock December 2011 Raymond Stock, former visiting assistant professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Drew University (2010-11), lived in Cairo for 20 years before being deported by the regime of Hosni Mubarak in December 2010, apparently due to his 2009 article criticizing then-Culture minister Farouk Hosni’s bid to head UNESCO in Foreign Policy Magazine. He has published widely on the Middle East and translated stories by many Arab writers, including seven books by Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz, whose biography he...

How the Egyptian literary czar [Farouk Hosni] who wants to lead the world's top cultural body [UNESCO] got caught up in his own country's rabid anti-Semitism. ___ To say that Farouk Hosni doesn't much like Israel is putting it lightly. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he has called it "inhuman," and "an aggressive, racist, and arrogant culture, based on robbing other people's rights and the denial of such rights." He has accused Jews of "infiltrating" world media. And in May 2008, Hosni outdid even himself, telling the Egyptian parliament that he would "burn right in front of you" any Israeli...

OP-ED COLUMNIST In the last few weeks not only has Iraq been destabilized by days with multiple suicide bombers, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also witnessed similar attacks by jihadist fanatics. How do you get so many people to commit suicide on demand, day after day? What's going on? In part the Arab-Muslim world is reaping something it sowed. Way too many Arab intellectuals and religious and political leaders were ready to extol suicide bombing when it was directed against Israelis. Now they are seeing how this weapon of nihilism - once sanctified and glorified - can be used...

Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, died today at the age of 94. I met him in December. He was at the back of a bar in a Cairo hotel on the Nile, and in the orange glow of the dark room he pressed his eyelids together like a cat dozing in the sun. He'd fallen at home earlier in the day, and he seemed fragile. His friends were concerned for his health, especially Raymond Stock. Raymond is an American academic and Mahfouz's biographer and translator. It is worth noting that for...

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi continues to reach out to America for help in rallying the forces of good against a rising tide of evil—the ever-spreading virus of militant Islam. And so far we are still snubbing him. As I have written before in this space, Sisi appears to be a surprising successor to the heroic British leader who first rallied his own people, then appealed to the New World to join not only his, but humanity's, cause against the Nazi menace—which is in many ways similar to the Islamist one today. Despite America's declared need for strong Arab allies in...

Come the Revolution By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN CAIRO To read the Arab press is to think that the entire Arab world is enraged with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and to some extent that's true. But here's what you don't read: underneath the rage, there is also a grudging, skeptical curiosity — a curiosity about whether the Americans will actually do what they claim and build a new, more liberal Iraq. While they may not be able to describe it, many Arabs intuit that this U.S. invasion of Iraq is something they've never seen before — the revolutionary side of...

I attended Friday's noon prayers at Cairo's Al Azhar, the most important mosque in Islam. Thousands of Egyptian faithful went through their traditional prostrations and listened to the sermon by the sheik of Al Azhar, who spoke in measured tones about how God deals with "oppressors." At the end, he appealed to God to rescue the Palestinians. It was all very solemn and understated. And then the excitement started. A split second after he finished, someone tossed in the air hundreds of political leaflets, and a young man was lifted onto the shoulders of the crowd and began denouncing "American...

CAIRO — To read the Arab press is to think that the entire Arab world is enraged with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and to some extent that's true. But here's what you don't read: underneath the rage, there is also a grudging, skeptical curiosity — a curiosity about whether the Americans will actually do what they claim and build a new, more liberal Iraq. While they may not be able to describe it, many Arabs intuit that this U.S. invasion of Iraq is something they've never seen before — the revolutionary side of U.S. power. Let me explain: For...

The Arab Preference for War Michael J. TottenEgyptian playwright Ali Salem visited Israel in 1994 to “rid himself of hatred,” as he put it, and he wrote a slim volume about his experience called A Drive to Israel. His book was a bestseller in Egypt, but Cairo’s intellectual class ostracized him. The Egyptian Cinema Association and the Egyptian Writers Association canceled his memberships.The Middle East Media Research Institute just translated an interview with him in Kuwait’s daily An Nahar newspaper that makes for depressing reading. His interlocutor harangues him throughout and comes across only somewhat more reasonable than the intellectual...

A few years ago I was visiting Bahrain and sitting with friends in a fish restaurant when news appeared on an overhead TV about Muslim terrorists, men and women, who had taken hostages in Russia. What struck me, though, was the instinctive reaction of the Bahraini businessman sitting next to me, who muttered under his breath, "Why are we in every story?" The "we" in question was Muslims. The answer to that question is one of the most important issues in geopolitics today: Why are young Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to Baghdad, so willing to...

May 24, 2004: The Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) regards its submarine force as its first line naval force. Not without reason. Only the submarine force has nuclear powered ships. More importantly, Chinese submarines pose the most significant threat to hostile naval forces, especially U.S. Navy carrier battle groups. The Chinese submarine force is undergoing rapid conversion to modern propulsion, sensor and weapons technologies. At the same time, serious measures have been taken to reduce noise levels and increase the effectiveness of the crews. The elite portion of the submarine force is its nuclear powered ships. Submarines are officially "ships"...

In his 1980 graduate thesis at the University of Texas at Austin, John Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and argued in favor of censorship on the part of the Egyptian dictatorship. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” Brennan wrote. “Inflamatory [sic] articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence, especially in developing political systems.” Brennan serves as President Barack Obama’s national security advisor. Obama has nominated him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Egypt’s Hatred for Anne PattersonPosted By Raymond Ibrahim On July 19, 2013 @ 12:48 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments Originally published by Gatestone Institute.Why do millions of Egyptians, including politicians and activists, consider Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “stooge”—as she is so commonly referred to by many in Egypt, from the media down to the street?In America, some are aware of matters, such as that “Patterson in particular resisted opportunities to criticize the Morsi government as it implemented increasingly authoritarian policies. In a memorable May interview with...

Egypt's new de facto pharaoh, General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, is a man of mystery. Is he an Islamist, or a nationalist? Is he a person of high principle, or a lowly opportunist? And in a land which has known five thousand years of mainly centralized, one-man rule, with limited experience of democracy, when have we seen his type before, and where will he lead the troubled, ancient nation now? These questions are crucial to knowing how the U.S. should react to al-Sisi's removal of Egypt's first "freely elected" president, Mohamed Morsi on July 3 in answer to overwhelmingly massive street protests...